Art Experts Fear Worst in the Plunder of a Museum
"Dr. Philippe de Montebello,
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, said,
"We can't conquer and then
shirk further responsibility by allowing anarchy in the cities
and allowing Iraq's ancient heritage to be pillaged."
The New York Times
April 13, 2003
nytimes.com
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
The looting of the National Museum of Iraq, a repository of treasures
from civilization's first cities and early Islamic culture, could be a
catastrophe for world cultural heritage, archaeologists and art experts
said on Friday.
"Baghdad is one of the great museums of the world,
with irreplaceable material," said Dr. John Malcolm Russell, a specialist in Mesopotamian
archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.
Though he and other scholars of antiquities were alarmed by the reports of looting,
they were not surprised. They said they feared the next cultural
target could be the important museum in Mosul, a northern city that is also in turmoil.
The Mosul museum holds many Assyrian artifacts from the
nearby Nineveh ruins.
Concerned archaeologists urged United States military leaders
to take more forceful steps to protect Iraqi's cultural treasures and to restore control
of them to the local Department of Antiquities.
For weeks before the war, archaeologists and other scholars
had alerted military planners to the
risks of combat, particularly postwar pillage of the country's antiquities.
These include 10,000 sites of ruins with such resonating names as Babylon,
Nineveh, Nimrud and Ur.
Experts reminded the Defense Department that after the Persian Gulf war of 1991,
9 of Iraq's 13 regional museums were plundered. The Baghdad
museum was spared then because the end of war had left the
government still in power and policing the city.
American archaeologists who studied the looting suspected
that some of it was driven by the illicit trade in antiquities.
At some remote and poorly guarded dig sites, Dr. McGuire Gibson
of the University of Chicago wrote recently that illicit digging in most cases
started as attempts simply to find something to sell to put food on the table.
"This work soon grew to an industry," he said, "financed from abroad
and engaging hundreds of diggers at some sites."
The reported museum looting that began on Friday in Baghdad
would be the war's first known plundering of Iraqi antiquities.
Reacting to the report, Dr. Philippe de Montebello,
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, said,
"We can't conquer and then
shirk further responsibility by allowing anarchy in the cities
and allowing Iraq's ancient heritage to be pillaged."
Dr. de Montebello complained of the apparent lack of effective
policing by American troops. He said that he and other museum officials and
archaeologists had already held meetings to explore what must
be done "to help the Baghdad museum and Iraqi's antiquities authorities to restore
themselves."
By chance, the damage to the Baghdad museum came
as the Metropolitan was preparing a major new exhibition, "Art of the First Cities: The Third
Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus."
It is to open May 8. About 400 rare works of art will be displayed, many of them from Iraq,
though no works from the Baghdad museum were available.
More than 230 scholars of ancient Mesopotamian history
from 25 countries have signed a petition to be delivered to the United Nations on Monday.
Drafted by researchers at Yale and Oxford Universities, the petition urges military leaders and postwar administrators of Iraq to safeguard cultural
artifacts "for the future of the Iraqi people and for the world."
American archaeologists said that they had lost contact
with their Iraqi colleagues in recent weeks. The last they had heard was that several
antiquities officials and researchers had barricaded themselves in the Baghdad museum.
They had hidden some of the most precious artifacts
elsewhere, and protected others with sandbags.
At last report, just before the outbreak of war on March 21,
Dr. Russell said that Dr. Donny George, the research director of antiquities who is
known for his heft, was seen to be thin and exhausted from the stress of preparing to defend the museum.
Of the several thousand artifacts at the museum, Dr. Russell
said some of his favorites were the stone birds from Nemrik, north of Mosul. The site,
investigated in the last decade, is one of the world's first villages, from about 8,000 B.C.
The museum's collection includes a cult vase from Uruk decorated
with some of the earliest narrative pictures from the Sumerian culture. The
pictures show fields and flocks and people making offerings to the goddess
Inanna, the Sumerian version of Ishtar.
"That's a beautiful, important piece," Dr. Russell said.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times |
